Conference Agenda
The Online Program of events for the 2026 AMS Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
Use the "Filter by Track or Type of Session" or "Filter by Session Topic" dropdown to limit results by type. Some of the sessions are also color-coded: purple indicates performances, grey indicates paper forums, and orange indicates sessions which have been organized by one of the regional associations of IMS (ARLAC or IMSEA). (Sessions which are both IMS sessions and performances are only colored orange.)
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Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 1st Sept 2026, 02:57:04am EDT
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Daily Overview |
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Politics of Identity and Representation in Latin America Session Chair: Hermann Hudde | |
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Fictions of Development, Phantoms of Decay: Ecuador’s National Conservatoire in a Transnational Context (1870-1912) University of Cambridge This paper investigates the foundation (1870) and reopening (1900) of Ecuador’s National Conservatoire, with an emphasis on the social and political role of Western art music in Quito during the late nineteenth century. It challenges the notion that these institutions were derivative attempts at emulating European models, and instead suggests that Ecuador’s Conservatories reflected a distinctive understanding of the social role of music. Through a combination of archival research and secondary literature, this paper argues that, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Western art music in Ecuador became a site to formulate and advance complex narratives around progress, crisis and cultural decay, culminating in the foundation of the National Conservatoire. Archival material is used to show that the figures behind these pedagogical initiatives were less concerned with cultivating international prestige or producing orchestral musicians than with addressing the perceived threat of moral and cultural degeneration in the country. Reconsidering the motivations behind these institutions, in turn, helps account for their admissions policies and teaching practices, as well as for the preference given to candidates from rural backgrounds, while also challenging the long-standing characterisation of such conservatoires as “failures” on the basis that they did not reach the same milestones as their European counterparts. This paper examines how music was mobilised as a tool to stop vice, prevent moral decadence and provide ethical guidance to the population, and the extent to which the state’s treatment of music education was in direct dialogue with European fin-de-siècle discourse around ‘decaying empires’ and a changing world order. In doing so, it situates the tendency towards the institutionalisation and proliferation of Western art music in Ecuador within the broader intellectual climate of the time, while also emphasising the aspirational role that development, as an idea, went on to assume in Latin America during this time. The second half of the paper compares Ecuador’s Conservatories to those of Chile and Argentina to argue that public investment in music education in these nations reflected a similar view of the demands and opportunities at the turn of the century. | |